[ckan-discuss] RDBMS Data Source

Wed Mar 21 22:24:08 GMT 2012

Shaq, Rufus,

I trust you're aware of the W3C RDB2RDF standardisation activity [1] which I have the pleasure to co-chair. Now, in the open source D2R project [2] we're currently working on implementing the RDB2RDF standard.

If you have any questions regarding this technology or how it may help address the requirements of the use case at hand, please feel free to contact me (guess off-list makes sense ?).

Cheers,
	   Michael

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/rdb2rdf/

[2] http://d2rq.org/

--
Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Research Fellow
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
Ireland, Europe
Tel.: +353 91 495730
WebID: http://sw-app.org/mic.xhtml#i

On 21 Mar 2012, at 22:14, Haq, Salman wrote:

> 
> 
> On 3/19/12 5:07 AM, "Rufus Pollock" <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 19 March 2012 00:47, Haq, Salman <Salman.Haq at neustar.biz> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I hope this is the right forum for this question:
>>> 
>>> Currently CKAN supports three types of data sources: CSV/Excel file
>>> upload,
>>> hyperlink to API, hyperlink to CSV/Excel file.
>>> 
>>> Is there a plugin that supports a relational database as fourth type of
>>> data
>>> source?
>> 
>> No, but it's a really interesting idea. You'd be wanting to add to
>> this extension:
>> 
>> <https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-datastorer>
>> 
>> Specifically (I think):
>> 
>> https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-datastorer/blob/master/ckanext/datastorer/
>> tasks.py#L86
>> 
>> @David (Raznick): any thoughts on this?
>> 
>>> Such a plugin could be provided a username/password combination to
>>> connect
>>> to the server and extract metadata information automatically. Pyodbc or
>>> SQLAlchemy could be used for implementing this.
>> 
>> Indeed. The issue here is how to provide the username / password info ...
>> 
>> Rufus
> 
> Rufus,
> 
> Thanks for your response. As a follow-up, I have a few other ideas that
> require feedback.
> 
> 1. Support for (partial) SQL dumps.
> This is in the same vein as connecting directly to a database. Except, as
> you pointed out, login information is usually guarded. But a SQL dump file
> can be parsed to learn the schema. We can limit ourselves to 'create
> table' and 'create view' statements as they are sufficient to understand
> the schema.
> 
> 2. 'Schema' preview for resources.
> Given that we can preview a resource in 'Grid' and 'Graph' form, what
> about an additional view that lists only the schema of the resource that
> is derived from the resource? RDF will be helpful here although it's not
> clear to me if there are well known ontologies to describe spreadsheets
> and relational databases. If satisfactory ontologies do not exist, perhaps
> they can be collaboratively developed by the OKFN community?
> 
> 3. Semantic types for attributes in the dataset.
> Provide a way for data custodians to associate a higher-level type with
> columns in a spreadsheet or relational table. Example of a semantic type
> can be email address, street address, telephone number, latitude, etc.
> This can be a part of the 'Schema' preview.
> 
> Thanks,
> Shaq
> 
> 
> 
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